The Ruta del Modernisme
run by
Modernisme Centre
(Pl. de Catalunya, 17, subterráneo; phone +34 933 177 652): guidebook and discount voucher book for €12. Takes you round all the best Modernisme (art nouveau) buildings in Barcelona. The main part of the route can be walked in a couple of hours, providing you don't stray too far from the main routes. The Tourist Offices offer a pack that includes discounted tickets to many attractions such as La Pedrera and La Casa Batlló. All can be seen from the outside for free.

View from Gaudi's Park Güell towards Barcelona's old town and seaside

Hop aboard the Bus Turístic to see all the key sights without moving a muscle

La Rambla, Barcelona's main boulevard

in La Mercè

Barcelona hosts a number of annual fiestas, many of which are unique to Catalonia and offer an insight into its distinctive culture.

Casa de l'Ardiaca during Corpus

During festivals and especially during
Mobile World Congress
which is a major trade show at the Fira, accommodation in Barcelona and especially near the Fira is much more difficult to find and more expensive than usual.

University Library

For those wishing to make a real attempt at learning the language, there are plenty of Catalan and Spanish language schools in Barcelona.

El Corte Inglés in Plaça de Catalunya is one of the few stores in the chain that is not an eyesore to look at - and provides a good view of the Plaça as well from its top-floor restaurant

Most shops and shopping malls are closed on Sundays because of law restrictions, but not all. In
Ciutat Vella
you will find plenty of small fashion shops, souvenir shops and small supermakets open on Sundays. The souvenir shopping scattered throughout the Barri Gotic and all along La Rambla are tourist traps, none of them sell Catalan or Spanish products but the typical array of Chinese general souvenirs, they should be avoided. Moreover on the Port Vell, right at the end of The Ramblas there is Maremagnum, a shopping mall that stays open all Sundays.

The market

Barcelona's cuisine is inconsistent in quality, as with all highly touristed cities, but good food does exist at reasonable prices. The golden rule of thumb applies well in Barcelona; to save money and get better food, look for places off the beaten track by fellow travellers and seek out cafes and restaurants where the locals frequent. A good idea is to avoid restaurants with touts outside and have a basic understanding of the traditional tapas served in restaurants as well as the local drinks.

Two big ideas often come up in discussions about the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, or SETI. One is the Drake Equation, which estimates the number of civilizations in our Galaxy whose signals we might be able to detect—potentially thousands, according to plausible estimates. The other is the so-called Fermi paradox, which claims that we should see intelligent aliens here if they exist anywhere, because they would inevitably colonize the Galaxy by star travel—and since we don’t see any obvious signs of aliens here, searching for their signals is pointless.

The Drake Equation is perfectly genuine: it was created by astronomer and SETI pioneer Frank Drake. The Fermi paradox, however, is a myth. It is named for the physicist Enrico Fermi—but Fermi never made such a claim.

I’d like to explain why the so-called Fermi paradox is mistaken, based on my deep-dive research on the topic, because this mistake has inhibited the search for E.T., which I think is worthwhile. It was cited by Sen. William Proxmire (D-WI) as a reason for killing NASA’s SETI program in 1981; the program was restarted at the urging of Carl Sagan, but was killed dead in 1993 by Senator Richard Bryan (D-NV). Since then, no searches in the U.S. have received government funds, even though thousands of new planets have been discovered orbiting stars other than our sun.

Enrico Fermi, a Nobel prizewinner who built the first nuclear reactor, never published a word on the subject of extraterrestrials. We know something about his views because physicist Eric Jones collected
written accounts
from the three surviving people present at a 1950 lunch in Los Alamos where the so-called Fermi paradox had its roots: Emil Konopinski, Edward Teller, and Herbert York (Fermi died in 1954).

According to these eyewitnesses, they were chatting about a cartoon in showing cheerful aliens emerging from a flying saucer carrying trash cans stolen from the streets of New York City, and Fermi asked “Where is everybody?” Everyone realized he was referring to the fact that we haven’t seen any alien spaceships, and the conversation turned to the feasibility of interstellar travel. York seemed to have had the clearest memory, recalling of Fermi:

Both York and Teller seemed to think Fermi was questioning the feasibility of interstellar travel—nobody thought he was questioning the possible existence of extraterrestrial civilizations. So the so-called Fermi paradox—which does question the existence of E.T.—misrepresents Fermi’s views. Fermi’s skepticism about interstellar travel is not surprising, because in 1950 rockets had not yet reached orbit, much less another planet or star.

If Fermi wasn’t the source of this pessimistic idea, where did it come from?

The notion “... they are not here; therefore they do not exist” first appeared in print in 1975, when astronomer Michael Hart claimed that if smart aliens existed, they would inevitably colonize the Milky Way. If they existed anywhere, they would be here. Since they aren’t, Hart concluded that humans are probably the only intelligent life in our galaxy, so that looking for intelligent life elsewhere is “probably a waste of time and money.” His argument has been challenged on many grounds—maybe star travel is not feasible, or maybe nobody chooses to colonize the galaxy, or maybe we were visited long ago and the evidence is buried with the dinosaurs—but the idea has become entrenched in thinking about alien civilizations.

In 1980, the physicist Frank Tipler elaborated on Hart’s arguments by addressing one obvious question: where would anybody get the resources needed to colonize billions of stars? He suggested “a self-replicating universal constructor with intelligence comparable to the human level.” Just send one of these babies out to a neighboring star, tell it to build copies of itself using local materials, and send the copies on to other stars until the Galaxy is crawling with them. Tipler argued that absence of such gizmos on Earth proved that ours is the only intelligence anywhere in the entire Universe—not just the Milky Way galaxy—which seems like an awfully long leap from the absence of aliens on our one planet.

Hart and Tipler clearly deserve credit for the idea at the heart of the so-called Fermi paradox. Over the years, however, their idea has been confused with Fermi’s original question. The confusion evidently started in 1977 when the physicist David G. Stephenson used the phrase ‘Fermi paradox’ in a paper citing Hart’s idea as one possible answer to Fermi’s question. The Fermi paradox might be more accurately called the ‘Hart-Tipler argument against the existence of technological extraterrestrials’, which does not sound quite as authoritative as the old name, but seems fairer to everybody.

As for the paradox, there is none, even in Hart’s and Tipler’s arguments. There is no logical contradiction between the statement “E.T. might exist elsewhere” and the statement “E.T. is not here” because nobody knows that travel between the stars is possible in the first place.

The Hart-Tipler argument, cloaked in the authority of Fermi’s name, has made some people pessimistic about the chances for success in SETI. But the suggestion that we should not look for intelligent life elsewhere because we don’t see aliens here is simply silly. There are some signs that the pessimism is lifting, most notably Yuri Milner’s privately funded project, which promises to contribute $100 million in funding over ten years. But searching millions of stars for signals at unknown frequencies might take more resources. Our searches typically ’see’ a spot on the sky no bigger than the Moon at any moment, which is only a tiny fraction of the sky. If we want to find something interesting in our era, we might need to look harder.

“... he went on to conclude that the reason that we hadn’t been visited might be that interstellar flight is impossible, or, if it is possible, always judged to be not worth the effort, or technological civilization doesn’t last long enough for it to happen.”

However, there are laws in place that prevent foreigners from being involved politically, and another law prevents derogatory comments about the state-approved religions (Hinduism, Buddhism, Christianity, Confucianism and Islam), fearing the risk of dividing the nation. Sadly, laws about corruption are weak and sentences are generally light when handled by the regular courts. The
Komisi Pemberantasan Korupsi
(Anti-Corruption Commission) is stricter about this and has its own police force and courts, but it too has been experiencing problems. KPK cases are mostly for Jakarta and Java and cases involving other islands are rarely enforced well enough to stop the illegal behaviour that caused them, such as the illegal deforestation and development in Kalimantan.

Things have slowly been improving, despite some intransigent corrupt operators in various departments of the government that you may have to deal with, and the requests for money, furniture, "blue" films and such have decreased and the quality of service in some Immigration offices has become better. The key is to remember that one bribe opens the floodgates, so never bribe.

For the most part, Indonesia's many peoples co-exist happily, however ethnic conflicts do continue to fester in some remote areas of the country. The policy of
transmigration
(
transmigrasi
), initiated by the Dutch but continued by Suharto, resettled Javanese, Balinese and Maduran migrants to less crowded parts of the archipelago. The new settlers, viewed as privileged and insensitive, were often resented by the indigenous populace and, particularly on
Papua
, this has sometimes led to violent conflict, but nowadays are relatively rare.

Contents

From Wikivoyage

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is
Spain
's second largest city, with a population of nearly two million people, and the capital of
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. A major port on the northeastern Mediterranean coast of Spain, Barcelona has a wide variety of attractions that bring in tourists from around the globe. The many faces of Barcelona include the medieval Old Town, and the unique street grid resulting from 19th-century urban planning. The city has long sandy beaches and green parks on the hills, pretty much side-by-side. It is also famous for a number of prominent buildings, of which the most-known are by the architect Antonio Gaudi, including his
Sagrada Família
, which became Barcelona's symbol to many.

Founded more than 2,000 years ago as the
ancient Roman
town
Barcino
, Barcelona is thus as historic as it is modern, with a constant flow of projects changing the face of the city and long-standing penchant for design and innovation. Thanks to the wealth of attractions, a very well-developed accommodation base, a lively nightlife and a robust transportation system, Barcelona has become one of Europe's, and pretty much the world's, most popular tourist destinations.

Map of Barcelona

Barcelona coastline in high summer

It rarely snows in Barcelona, but when it does it highlights the closeness of the mountain range at one end of the city to the seaside on the other

August is probably the busiest time for tourists in Barcelona. However, many shops and restaurants are closed from early-August to early September. During this time, you will find the most expensive hotel rates (outside of conference times such as the Mobile World Congress), and the city is devoid of locals, as the vast majority of residents go on vacation in August and leave the heat and humidity to the hordes of arriving tourists. This is also one of the highest periods of home break-ins, as criminals know that many places are unoccupied for an entire month.